Is the end of AIDS in sight?

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/09/17/is-the-end-of-aids-in-sight

by Anon84 • 3 years ago

79 149 3 years ago

amanj41• 3 years ago

A little off topic, but may be beneficial to uppercase all of "Aids" to "AIDS" to avoid ambiguity

adrianmonk2• 3 years ago

To an American audience, yeah, it's definitely better in all caps.

However, The Economist is British, and sometimes in British English they capitalize acronyms that way. Only "true" (pronounceable) acronyms, though, so they'll write Nato ("nay toh") and BBC ("bee bee see").

pathartl• 3 years ago

Clarifying what you mean, all acronyms are pronounceable, otherwise they're just a sparkling initialism.

edflsafoiewq• 3 years ago

The article uses "AIDS". It's just the HN title mangler at work.

cglong• 3 years ago

This was likely the HN title autoformatter at work. I knew what the title was trying to say, but I couldn't help but think of that South Park episode :)

dang• 3 years ago

Fixed now.

irreticent• 3 years ago

It also might be more accurate to not refer to AIDS as a virus. It is a syndrome caused by HIV. HIV is the virus.

teeray• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/vNEMG

ftyers• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/vNEMG

giantg22• 3 years ago

"Is the End of Aids in Sight?"

Short answer - no. Even if they achieve their ambitious plan, 5% is still a large number. Look at how hard it has been to eradicate the last of polio, and that has a lifelong vaccine.

deaddodo• 3 years ago

At this point, even if a genuine vaccine/cure for AIDS were developed; most people wouldn't even know until a loved one directly affected or afflicted told them.

The "breakthrough in AIDS research" or "cure in sight" headlines are so recurrent at this point that people are just numb to a real breakthrough.

londons_explore3• 3 years ago

It's also a self-balancing system. As HIV becomes rarer, fewer people will be concerned about it, and therefore fewer will bother taking Prep daily. In turn, HIV becomes more infectious, and more people contract it.

It will probably stabilize with about 0.4% of humans being infected.

Lots of things affect about 0.4% of people, because that's rare enough that most people don't have any friend or colleague affected, and therefore don't take precautions.

binarymax• 3 years ago

Where did you get that 0.4% number? Is this a well-established statistic?

Simulacra• 3 years ago

IMO Prep has raised the risk of HIV by giving people a false sense of security.

wholien• 3 years ago

Short answer - no.

A tangent: if an article's title is a question, the answer, vast majority of time, is either "no", or not a clear answer at all. I'm sure articles that answer the title with "yes" exist, but I cannot even remember one.

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more lethal than COVID, COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+.

My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache. COVID, conversely, has all but disappeared from the national stage, despite still actively killing large numbers of people. Pointing this out even now is likely to draw accusals of one being a terrified nut or obsessive. It’s such a drastic change, that it’s hard to reconcile a past where public health and the moral dimensions around our practice of it played such a prominent part in our culture with the disregard and denial of the present.

EDIT:

To clarify, I’m speaking about my experience of both pandemics in the US. Worldwide, AIDS has of course killed more people than COVID.

tristor• 3 years ago

I've noticed the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's because COVID no longer features as part of identity politics. It's the identity politics that drove the AIDS discussion, and it's been the identify politics that drove the COVID discussion. Now that has passed, COVID is no longer a topic people care to discuss regularly, while AIDS is still a forefront topic.

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

While this may be true to an extent, it doesn’t address why fighting AIDS outside the context of its impact on the LGBTQ community, e.g. in the developing world, still figures so prominently in American culture and public policy. I expect that the real reason is actually something more sinister, where the politics of the US have devolved to a point where almost everyone will accept the “they deserved it” narrative that was used to vilify those with HIV/AIDS, whether it be of the “they’re were old/fat/weak” or “unvaccinated” variety.

diogenes43• 3 years ago

More like identity politics is why AIDS was completely neglected. With COVID it's clear that capital couldn't stomach the effects treating it properly would have on the labor market. What a ham-handed way to compare two wildly unsimilar scenarios.

pluto_modadic• 3 years ago

because one caused a moral panic, and one needed people to be moral.

DelaneyM2• 3 years ago

…COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+.

Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”.

There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to them are similarly difficult to compare, but I’m not going to bother with that conversation here.

[https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet], [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/]

jlmorton• 3 years ago

OP was probably referring to the American experience, which is correct. AIDS has killed about 700,000 in the USA, vs 1.1 million Covid deaths.

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

Apologies, I should’ve clarified that I was referring to the US, where COVID has, in fact, killed more people than HIV/AIDS.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-...

abeppu3• 3 years ago

You copied info from that first page incorrectly; 85.6M is their estimate on number of infections and 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.

einpoklum• 3 years ago

How does the WorldMeters site reach the covid 7M figure? I know that deciding how to attribute deaths to covid is not that trivial (e.g. as opposed to deaths with covid; or people who did not get tested, i.e. unconfirmed deaths etc.)

graeme3• 3 years ago

As abeppu points out, this is their death estimate: 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.

Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. Our world in data reports 26 million excess deaths to date, about 5 million in the past year. That's with three years of data, vs. three decades for HIV.

There's surely some HIV undercount too, but it's a reasonable bet that covid will exceed HIV in terms of deaths long run.

abeppu3• 3 years ago

My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache

... but for years, the HIV/AIDS crisis _was_ ignored, or even laughed at by critical people in government. When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s, a decade after the crisis got started? I think the fairer comparison will be to however we talk about COVID in the 2030s.

https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

While this is correct, my point was that the experience of the HIV/AIDS seemingly had no impact on our handling of COVID. But Reagan/AIDS, Trump/COVID, is a pretty bleak manifestation of “first as tragedy, then as a farce.”

OfSanguineFire• 3 years ago

When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s

I see the GP’s edit that he is indeed from the USA, but I still think it should be emphasized that what you write wasn’t necessary true for HN readers from some other countries. I just watched Agnès Varda’s film Kung-Fu Master, which was made in 1986 and incorporates some documentary aspects: it shows UK television already replete with coverage of HIV-AIDS and how to have safe sex, and AIDS-prevention activists addressing passersby on the streets of Paris. Fear of AIDS was a mere sideshow in the film’s plot, but this all gave the film considerable value as an insight into that era.

gwbas1c• 3 years ago

With COVID, pretty much everyone would get it just by going about their normal day-to-day life. It effected everyone.

In contrast, many people in the US lead a lifestyle that puts them at almost no risk for AIDS. Furthermore, a large majority / plurality of Americans are Christians where the religion actively encourages monogamy. (And this is my opinion,) the large group of people who practice monogamy consider the lifestyle so easy that "oh, we should just encourage monogamy as a solution" is a snap judgement with a clear lack of empathy for people who aren't monogamous.

(I should point out that even though I am monogamous, I've had circles of friends that are very promiscuous. Each group has a lot of trouble empathizing with the other lifestyle. I had a lot of ridicule in college and at Burning Man for not being promiscuous; and both my father and grandfather encountered the same thing in the US Navy.)

So, it's taken awhile for the monogamous majority / plurality to really understand that the solution for the AIDS crisis isn't to just promote monogamy. One example is very clear in George W. Bush's memoir. Even though he is conservative, Christian, (and I assume monogamous,) his stated goal in his presidency was to solve the AIDS crisis; and he implied that purely teaching monogamy wasn't going to work. He had a lot of regret that incidents in his presidency took his focus away from the AIDS crisis.

hn_throwaway_998• 3 years ago

As a gay man well into middle age, whenever I get somewhat depressed about the state of human affairs, I think about the incredible improvements in AIDS treatment and prevention and I feel a little better.

It's hard for people who didn't live through it to really understand what a terrifying time the 80s and 90s were. First off, the general message of sexual education was pretty much "If you have sex, it's probably going to kill you." There's some hyperbole there, but not much. There was really no such thing as "sex-positive messaging", and even many years later it took me time to realize how much I had internalized "sex is a bad, dangerous thing". More importantly, though, is that an HIV diagnosis really was seen as a death sentence. If you're in your 20s, imagine a situation where tons of your friends had died, and there was an ever-present fear that you might be next. I honestly believe everyone who lived through that time in that situation has some level of PTSD.

So yes, there is still a lot to do as this article points out, but it is really amazing to see how far we've come. Even a lot of the issues pointed out in the article had less to do with technology and (honestly to my surprise) economic access than with shitty cultural practices (e.g. overall misogyny and men refusing to get tested). It's important to not lose vigilance, but I think it's also important to indulge in a moment of gratitude every now and then to all the warriors (both in the medical and research fields, and the many patients who lost their lives) who have accomplished so much for all of humanity.

at_a_remove2• 3 years ago

I often mention the whole Gen X trauma thing.

Part of it is literally seeing the ladder being pulled up just as we reached for it. Not just for jobs or college tuition, but also sexually -- the previous generation had a pretty good time and the worst that was on offer was herpes. Puberty starts rumbling around and we're wondering what the future looks like and suddenly "GRID." And we were flailing around, is it viral? (There was, most people do not know, a period wherein it was thought that this was some kind of weird immune reaction to getting semen, any semen, into the bloodstream, which seemed unlikely to me even as a tween) How transmissible is it? Okay so maybe kissing doesn't do anything. And by the time that we figured out that it isn't exactly Ebola in terms of transmissibility, some damage was done.

So, Sex = Death, rain is acid, the bees are coming, the nukes will eradicate us all. Gen X has been waiting for the other shoe to drop for decades and AIDS was just one facet of it.

TZubiri4• 3 years ago

herpes is the worst thing? What about chlamydia, gonorrhea?

PH95VuimJjqBqy2• 3 years ago

I'm Gen X and I don't agree with this at all.

There's this idea that every generation bitches about the generation that comes after it, but I submit to you that every generation apparently also has people in it that see themselves as a special victim, as if the generations that came before it didn't also have their own challenges.

hinkley2• 3 years ago

I point out that the eighties got so bad that George Michael, known mostly for writing happy celebratory songs, very nearly released a 'whole world is going to end' song in 1990's "Praying for Time"

It's hard to love / there's so much to hate / hanging on to hope / when there is no hope to speak of / And the wounded skies above / say it's much too late / So maybe we should all be praying for time.

They released that on the radio, it went to #1 on the Billboard charts, and stayed on the charts for 10 weeks. All while the First Gulf War was starting. Which he wouldn't have known when he was writing it.

TZubiri4• 3 years ago

Aids is definitely the strongest sexually transmitted virus out there. But don't you think that there will always be sexually transmitted diseases associated with promiscuity? Not to say that aids is only transmitted through promiscuity, but superspreading is highly relevant.

It is my understanding that gay people have more sex partners than than straight people, so it's likely that these diseases will disproportionately affect gay men.

I think that limiting amount of partners is a vital part to combating sexually transmitted diseases, and that some people will have sex until they encounter the physical limitation of STDs. Not sure "sex-positive" messaging is quite helpful in this sense.

civilitty• 3 years ago

It's not the 90s anymore. In the developed world HIV primarily and disproportionately effects IV drug users, not gay men.

In the developing world, it has nothing to do with promiscuity but lack of education and access to preventative measures like condoms and PrEP.

EatingWithForks• 3 years ago

The difference with AIDS is that AIDS at the time condemned you to a slow, horrible, visible decline, in which your death was celebrated via a radio talk show host that at the time had an entire regular segment to name and mock the people who died.

Like, this doesn't apply to people who get cervical cancer from HPV or other similarly tragic outcomes of acquiring an STD. The cruelty on the scale is way above anything.

hn_throwaway_998• 3 years ago

The point I try to get across is to separate "promiscuity is inherently bad" from "sex can have serious negative consequences that you should appropriately plan for depending on your risk tolerance."

Another way to think of it: it's also highly likely that if you go to a crowded event that there are tons of diseases you can expose yourself to. Pre-COVID, people used to talk about getting "SXSW flu", e.g. with so many crowded events at SXSW it was nearly impossible to avoid getting sick. Importantly, at some times (obviously when there was a high prevalence of COVID), I think this risk is too great and crowds should be avoided. At other times, though, I think it's utterly reasonable to think that the risk of a cold or flu is worth it to go to a bunch of fun concerts. Nobody ever talks about "You know, there will always be a ton of dangerous diseases associated with concert-going, so you should always avoid them."

So when it comes to sex, I find it totally reasonable to adjust your behavior based on the risk at the time. Currently, e.g. for a gay man on PrEP, lets look at potential risks:

1. HIV risk is extremely low for those who adhere to PrEP.

2. Most bacterial infections can be cured straightforwardly with antibiotics.

3. The biggest risks are then (a) lifetime viral diseases, primarily Herpes, and (b) at this point, multi-drug resistant gonorrhea.

Thus, I think it's important to be aware of #3 and to take precautions, again relevant to your risk level, accordingly. What I don't think makes sense is to say "But you never know what could spring up!" That's true, but if you look at the recent monkeypox outbreak, I think a lot of people had the right approach: when the outbreak was publicized, many people (a) stopped or reduced their number of sexual partners and then (b) got vaccinated as quickly as possible.

The primary point I'm making is to disentangle the real risks associated with sex (and to treat them dispassionately) from the the moralizing around "you're a dirty whore if you have sex a lot."

0xbadcafebee2• 3 years ago

Promiscuity does not propagate sexually transmitted diseases. You are working off of a false stereotype which has limited the capacity of your rational thought, and as a result, you imagine a world which does not exist, and propose solutions which will not work. This is a common problem with HN people. They come up with this one idea that kind-of makes sense, and then stop thinking, and shape their whole thought process around this false premise.

Did you take a second to google this idea you had to see if it made sense? No; because if you had, you'd have found that HIV is spread by blood, semen, pre-seminal fluid, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, breast milk. People who inject hormones, silicone, steroids, and drugs, can get or transmit HIV by sharing needles, syringes, or other injection equipment. It can be spread through pregnancy or stepping on an infected needle at the beach. It's often spread by not using protection during sex. And straight and gay people both get it.

Gay people do not have more sex partners than straight people. Promiscuous people do have more partners than non-promiscuous people. Gay, straight, bi, queer, etc, can all be promiscuous, just like they can all also be monogamous or even asexual. You may not like that de-simplification, but it exposes the flaw in this notion that gay people are sluts and sluts get STDs. It just doesn't work that way. Safe sex, even if you fuck a lot of people, makes you much less likely to get an STD than if you only occasionally had sex and never use protection. In countries with limited access to safe sex, all people across all demographics contract it. It's not just poor Africans and gay men, despite that being the unfortunately common misconception.

k__• 3 years ago

As someone living promiscuously, I'd say it's a correlation.

Some factors that lead people to a promiscuous livestyle also lead them to high risk behaviours, probably because they see promiscuous sexual behaviour also as risky and, in turn, desirable.

I met many that would frown upon condoms, but I also met many that would see them as no big deal.

I for one would count myself as risk averse, and got to that lifestyle through other motivations, and in turn, always ensured to stay safe.

foldr3• 3 years ago

I think that limiting amount of partners is a vital part to combating sexually transmitted diseases

It's much more important to have safe sex. Condoms and PrEP work.

Every thread on HN about HIV/AIDS seems to attract at least one person who feels obliged to say something about how promiscuous gay people are. I don't think these comments often come from a good place. (For example, you have previously made a rather insensitive joke about 'pozzing' on this site.)

RC_ITR• 3 years ago

Unfortunately you're buying into a lot of propaganda that persists to this day.

Straight sex workers exist. Given straight people outnumber gay people by (let's say) 10:1, there is almost certainly a higher absolute number of straight promiscuous potential superspreaders than there are gay ones.

Even in the middle of the bell curve, nearly 50% of American babies are born to unmarried parents, so it's not like strict monogamy is the norm among straight people [0]

The reason that HIV transmitted so well in gay male populations is because receptive anal sex has a 20x higher likelihood of transmission than receptive vaginal sex and a 40x higher likelihood of transmission vs. insertive sex.[1]

Within the gay community, you have plenty of men who engage in that relatively high risk act of receptive anal sex, who then go on to be the insertive party in another interaction.

Within straight populations, the potential spreaders are just much less likely to contract HIV in the first place.

Sorry to be so specific about something sexual, but I have always found it odd that this very practical information has not been put into the mainstream. I guess it's the imperfect middleground - people who want to shame gay men don't care about the data and people who support gay men don't want to stigmatize receptive anal sex. But unfortunately, I bet it's led to a lot of needlessly risky behaviors.

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/unmarried/unmarrie... [1] https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and....

ChrisMarshallNY4• 3 years ago

I have spent my adult life in a community that experiences higher-than-average HIV/HepC exposure, and well remember the "Great Die-Off" of the early-to-mid 1990s.

To anyone that missed out, dying of AIDs is horrible. The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies, with very little of the transmission happening through homosexual contact.

Africa has a big problem with that, and misogyny also plays into it, as the article mentions.

The thing that disgusted me the most, was the "Good riddance" attitude of many folks. I see echoes of that, in the Fentanylopocalypse, going on, now. As soon as Muffy and Biff start popping their clogs, though, it becomes a "national tragedy."

logicchains• 3 years ago

but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies,

Fortunately life expectancies are steadily rising even in the African countries hardest hit by HIV. Eswatini for instance has over 25% of the population HIV positive, but the life expectancy is now up to around 60 years (it was around 40 two decades ago), only 5 years behind Pakistan.

aaomidi• 3 years ago

The good riddance attitude is so, so disturbing to me. And it’s fucked that we still have that attitude today.

hn_throwaway_998• 3 years ago

The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies

That's not really true, as the article points out. PEPFAR has really done amazing work lowering the HIV mortality rate in developing countries. And a reminder of who may keep this program from being reauthorized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/29/pepfar-aids...

Obscurity43402• 3 years ago

How does it relate to misogyny if you don't mind me asking?

egorfine• 3 years ago

I am afraid to ask but what is similar between AIDS and Fentanylopocalypse? Surely no one choses to get HIV. Surely drug usage is a choice once made. What is the link between the two I am missing here?

water-data-dude• 3 years ago

I feel like that “good riddance” attitude is a left over from an earlier time in human history. When the struggle for resources was life or death, and the survival of your community sometimes meant going to war with another community and killing other human beings, it was probably extremely useful to be able to mentally put those other other humans into a “not people” category. Now we’re living in a different world where survival doesn’t work like that anymore, but we still have the machinery in our heads that wants to classify The Other Group as less than human.

LordDragonfang• 3 years ago

One of the (younger) queer creators I follow posted about how they'll occasionally stumble upon pictures of the famous "NO OBITS" newspaper headline[1], and feel a surge of hope for our species.

https://www.ebar.com/story.php?ch=news&sc=news&id=280418

dekhn2• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. One of my major motivations when I was in high school- around the time that AIDS was starting to grow rapidly, was to go into drug discovery to find medicines that could cure HIV infection/reduce the impact of AIDS on patients.

At the time (about 5-6 years later) we were working on reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which I think eventually turned out to work pretty well as an early treatment. But boy, was the process slow... decades of basic and applied biology... to get where we are today.

It's so painful to watch COVID vax deniers today because it's hard enough to stay motivated over long periods of time... but when people just sort of crap all over the important scientific and medical work to get to where we are, it reminds me of some of the aggressive groups, such as Act Up SF (which actively fought against the establishment, including Fauci, who was a critical ally to HIV-infected patients at the time): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/anthony-fauci-hiv...

hinkley2• 3 years ago

I suspect you've blotted out some of the worst of the early years, when lots of people didn't understand that it could only transmit through bodily fluids. People were afraid of the idea of being in the same room with someone with HIV. We had education campaigns about this. PSAs. Character arcs in prime time TV shows. Maybe that period was short in California, but it was spread out over years in the midwest.

I'm not convinced that the trauma of Covid for some adults wasn't re-experiencing the trauma of the AIDS epidemic. Here's another scary disease and we don't know how it's communicated and it's killing people and ruining their lives. Will it still be killing people in ten years? Ebola and a few others threatened to do the same, but they never actually arrived.

bdcravens• 3 years ago

I have a friend who does work (mostly manual labor, handyman stuff, etc) for me in our house. In his early 60s, strong as an ox, and he's been HIV-positive since the 80s. That deserves an asterisk, as his levels are below detectability (and I believe transmissibility), and have been for a long time.

mathewsanders3• 3 years ago

That's fantastic! I was recently doing some research and learnt that with ART people who are HIV+ can actually expect to live a little longer than people who are HIV-. I think it's because they have more regular check ups to make sure that treatment is being maintained.

mathewsanders3• 3 years ago

They can take pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep), a kind of drug that reduces their chance of contracting it by 99% or so. This comes as a daily pill, and is popular among gay men in rich countries.

The article takes a global focus (which makes sense since most new HIV diagnoses happen outside of the United States), but even the United States has over 30,000 new HIV infections per year.

In 2021 feds mandated that insurance companies must include PrEP as free preventative care, but that doesn't help the most at risk who are young and may not be insured (30-day supply of generic PrEP costs ~$2,500, and every 3 months people must have doctor visit and bloodwork to check HIV and STIs, and for potential liver and kidney damage).

In 2022 a federal judge ruled that they can not require Christian companies to cover PrEP as this violates their religious rights under federal law[1]. This will likely make it's way up to the Supreme Court, and there's a high risk that as a result people in the United States will then need to pay out of pocket for PrEP.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/09/07/court-hiv-prep-requirement-...

cltby3• 3 years ago

Rather depressing that we're subsidizing wanton sexual indulgence to the tune of $30k/year/person.

elil172• 3 years ago

Just to dispel some myths here:

1. Many people who use PrEP have only one partner. They're using PrEP because their partner has HIV.

2. The alternative is letting people get AIDs. This is more expensive than PrEP.

3. Insurance doesn't pay the full list price of drugs, they pay a lower, negotiated rate. CostPlus Drug Company charges about $20/month for PrEP. This is probably closer to what insurance companies actually pay.

535188B17C937432• 3 years ago

So queer people should remain celibate?

Other methods of protection fail. People lie about the status. People don't know their status.

Know what's ridiculous is that these drugs cost so much money and companies like Gilead can engage in "revenue maximization" schemes at the cost of the health of US citizens... and then apparently win lawsuits with their Big Pharma war chests.

Clamchop2• 3 years ago

What motivated you to share this?

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

Dude.

Have a heart.

diogenes43• 3 years ago

It doesn't help that heterosexual use of prep is virtually unheard of.

hellojesus2• 3 years ago

I hear of it, but typically it's only taken by those who engage in high risk activities. There are potential issues with the liver and kidney that make it not worthwhile if one isn't at moderate to high risk.

chimeracoder3• 3 years ago

30-day supply of generic PrEP costs ~$2,500

Er, no, generic Truvada costs $30-$60/month, although it was not available as a generic in 2019, which is when the mandate for free PrEP without cost-sharing was first issued. (The mandate was issued in 2019, but it did not fully go into effect until 2021).

That said, the drug costs aren't the only (or even biggest) costs associated with PrEP - the doctors' vists and labwork are much more. Under the ACA, those were required to be covered for free on all insurance plans, but a judge in Amarillo, TX blocked that as part of a ruling on a lawsuit against abortion care.

and for potential liver and kidney damage

They aren't checking for liver damage. They do check for indications that the drug isn't being absorbed correctly, which is done via a test for kidney functioning, but kidney issues for both Truvada and Descovy as PrEP are extremely rare. And there are no liver concerns associated with either one.

mathewsanders3• 3 years ago

I guess I don't fully understand U.S. healthcare system (I'm an immigrant from a country with universal healthcare, and this is the first time in my life that I've had a medication prescribed other than short-term antibiotics).

I pay a $10 co-pay for generic with my insurance, but when I pick up from pharmacy the receipt says "you insurance saved you $1888" (you're right it's not ~$2500/month - I just checked and that's a different prescription I have that I get filled at the same time).

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

For a rich person by global standards, HIV is a solved problem in the US right?

PreP for people trying to inhibit both progression and transmission of HIV and PeP for those that don't have it

The article talked about a new 3 month lasting version of PeP as well

when we’re not talking about uninsured and poor people, this is done now, right?

cishet men dont have anything near the vulnerability surface as other populations, if I’m understanding correctly. just test and move on or react accordingly. anybody that was subject to the traumatic sex-scare education of the 80s to early 2000s should just get updated education.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

When AIDS and MS are manageable diseases, you know you live in a miraculous society.

local_crmdgeon2• 3 years ago

MS has become manageable? Is that true???

bitwize2• 3 years ago

It's a lot more manageable now than when Annette Funicello was diagnosed. People who stay on their treatment regimen can live decades of productive life with the disease.

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

Is there any doubt?

I mean I get a bottle of pills mailed to me every quarter, i don’t have insurance at the moment and Costco only charges me like $100 for that supply - and all I have to do is pop one Truvada a day, and I’m practically immune to AIDS.

How could AIDS hope to persist with that kind of treatment so readily available? (Other than in poverty and mental illness, where all kinds of things stick around because people don’t have the wherewithal to undertake treatment obviously)